


Awakening

by WorryinglyInnocent



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: A Monthly Rumbelling, Cursed!AU, F/M, Golden Lace, NSFW, Smut, cursebreak, s1 au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-19
Updated: 2018-01-19
Packaged: 2019-03-06 23:00:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13421442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WorryinglyInnocent/pseuds/WorryinglyInnocent
Summary: Gold is thrown for six when Lacey invites him to spend the night. They’ve never spent the night together before. It’s not part of their unspoken arrangement. But in the dark, certain truths are revealed…For the @a-monthly-rumbelling prompt: “I don’t mind if we sleep in the same bed tonight.”





	Awakening

“I don’t mind if we sleep in the same bed tonight.”

Gold glances across at Lacey. She’s not looking at him. She’s staring straight up at the ceiling like she so often does after their encounters, as if she’s trying hard to remember some long forgotten past. The ideas of a good fucking being enough to jolt long-hidden memories to the surface is an amusing one, but he pushes it aside in favour of contemplating the gravity of the blank, blunt statement. Lacey is inviting him to spend the night with her. For all the many times they’ve had sex, neither of them has ever stayed the full night with the other before. For the most part, their liaisons take place in the back room of his shop, or in the bathroom of whatever seedy club Lacey’s decided to frequent that night. Even on the rare occasions, like tonight, when they do end up in a bed, the visitor never stays, leaving in the darkness and making that walk of not-quite-shame before anyone else is around to bear witness.

Not tonight, though. Tonight, Lacey wants him to stay with her, and it has completely thrown him for a loop. He doesn’t know how to react. This was never their relationship. It’s always been quick booty calls and meaningless fucking. It was never supposed to be anything deeper than that. He prides himself on being the town monster, cold-hearted and cruel with no tenderness for anyone. If it were to get out that he was contemplating actually spending the night with Lacey French of all people, then his reputation would be in utter ruins.

“I mean, you can go if you want,” Lacey continues. “I don’t care. I’m just saying. If you want to stay, stay.”

Gold takes a moment to consider the two extremely simple options that are nonetheless giving him one hell of a headache. Or maybe that’s just all the cheap whisky that he drank in the Rabbit Hole tonight. Finally, Lacey turns to look at him.

“Well? Are you staying or going?”

Gold readjusts his position under the covers, getting comfortable against Lacey’s cheap, all but flat pillows.

“Staying,” he says. He tells himself that it’s for practicality’s sake. It’s cold out and he’s too drunk to drive. He doesn’t want to admit that he’s very intrigued to find out what brought on this sudden change of heart in Lacey.

She doesn’t speak again, closing her eyes and lying very still, and Gold finds himself at a loss. Lacey’s never been the cuddly sort, so should he try and get closer and sleep with her, curled around her like a deep-buried part of him craves? Or is this an invitation to share her bed in its most blatant sense – she will sleep on her side and he will sleep on his, and they’re only in the same bed in the first place because she’s doing him a favour by not kicking him out in the middle of the night like normal.

He closes his eyes, remaining on his side of the bed, but he doesn’t think that sleep will be forthcoming at all. The mystery of Lacey’s offer still flits around his mind as he tries to make sense of it.

He must have fallen asleep at some point, because he wakes suddenly, unsure what pulled him out of slumber. The room is still pitch dark, so he can’t have been out for that long.

It’s then that he hears it, the thing that woke him. A soft, muffled sob.

Surreptitiously, trying not to betray the fact he’s awake, Gold cracks one eye open and takes in Lacey. She’s sitting up in bed, a ratty old oversize t-shirt pulled on, and her face buried in her hands, rocking back and forth as she cries as quietly as she can. Gold feels the metallic taste of fear coating the back of his throat. He’s never known Lacey to cry before. He’s seen her angry and he’s seen her mutinous, but this profound despair is new to her. He closes his eyes again, and wonders what has brought on this sudden display of emotion. Not that it’s really a display, since she thinks he’s still asleep and from the way she is so obviously trying to hide her tears, she doesn’t want him to wake.

As his mind falls over itself trying to work out an explanation, she begins to whisper, her voice barely above a breath, and Gold feels her fingertips hovering above his cheek.

“Please remember me, Rumpel,” she whispers, and if Gold was puzzled before, then he’s completely lost now. “Please remember me. I remember you now. Please remember me. I can’t keep up this pretence much longer. I love you, and I can’t pretend not to care. Please, remember me. Come back to me, Rumpel.”

Her hand moves away, and all is silent save for her shaky breathing.

Those three fatal words imprint themselves on Gold’s brain. _I love you._ Lacey loves him. Why she’s calling him Rumpel is another matter entirely, but one that can be dealt with at a later time. Lacey French, who has always made it clear that their relationship is casual and nothing more, loves him. The revelation sends his own feelings towards her into a spiral of confusion. Does he love her back? He can’t deny that he has always wanted more from their relationship, however it’s defined, but he has never been able to tell if that desire had arisen from a genuine love or simply the need to possess. Is there love involved after all? He wants to hold her and comfort her more than anything in the world right now, and that at least hints at some deeper feeling.

Gold can’t pretend to obliviousness any longer and he opens his eyes. Lacey is curled up in on herself, hugging her knees, and she looks so small and delicate. She’s the same person, but she’s a far cry from the self-confident, brash Lacey he has always known.

“Lacey?”

She gives him the briefest of smiles, then seems to remember herself and turns away quickly.

“Lacey, is something wrong?”

Lacey shakes her head. “No, no. I’m fine. Go back to sleep.”

“You’re not fine. You’re crying.”

“Since when have you cared?”

“Since you let me stay the night.”

Lacey turns back towards him, and there’s utter hopelessness in her eyes.

“Gold,” she begins, but the word sounds wrong from her tongue, it sounds like she has to force it when something else would come so much more naturally. She tails off, and gives a long sigh before running a hand through her hair. She always looks different with it down and brushed out. So much calmer and more sedate.

“Lacey, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” she says honestly, and then she’s moving closer, cupping his face and leaning in to give him a deep and very deliberate kiss.

Somewhere in the back of Gold’s mind, something shifts. Reality is just the slightest bit warped for all of a millisecond, and in that tiny moment, he understands everything.

Then Lacey pulls away and the moment is gone. She looks at him intensely, searching his eyes, but whatever it was that she was looking for is evidently not there, as she looks away with a melancholy smile.

“Never mind,” she says, settling back down under the covers and rolling over, her back to him. Gold reaches out and touches her arm.

“What can I do to make it better?” he asks.

Lacey doesn’t reply for a very long time, although Gold can tell that she’s not asleep, and finally she turns over to face him again.

“Can we make love now?” she asks. “Please?”

There’s nothing really odd in the request aside from the fact that it is Lacey making it. They’ve never made love. Their relationship consists of fucking with no deeper emotion. Gold has often wondered what it would be like to make love to Lacey, to really take their time and put every ounce of emotion into their union, but they’ve never done it. He’s always assumed it was because there was no emotion there to put into the act, but it seems that apparently he was wrong. So he nods, and he kisses her with that same serious deliberation, feeling that something shift but not quite enough to make a difference. A veil is being drawn aside, but slowly, and the picture beyond it is still too fuzzy to be made sense of. He pushes that strange feeling to the side and concentrates on Lacey instead, tipping her over onto her back and kissing every inch of skin he can, pulling her old t-shirt up over her head and laying her out so that he can lavish attention on her breasts and stomach, kissing and licking his way down to her sweet centre. He’s as gentle as he knows how to be, working his tongue against her clit and along her folds until she’s hot and slick with arousal, and her fingers are curling in his hair.

“Come up,” she gasps, right on the edge of her orgasm, and Gold looks up, a little perturbed at being stopped when he’s so close to bringing her off. She does truly look like a goddess spread out on the bed like that, her skin pale in the dark room. She’s something so much more than Lacey tonight. Something bright and beautiful and _someone that he loves_.

The revelation almost floors him there and then.

“Come up,” Lacey repeats, trying to pull him up her body. “I want you to come with me. Together.”

Still a little shaken from the realisation that not only does Lacey love him, he loves her back, Gold obeys her summons, moving up the bed so that he’s on top of her, and Lacey scrabbles in her nightstand to get a condom. There’s something in her eyes as he moves inside her that Gold’s never seen there before, something that goes beyond the sparkle of unshed tears. Her arms and legs are clamped tightly around him, as if she never wants to let him go, and he feels the moment she comes, her inner walls fluttering around his cock.

“Rumpel!” she sobs.

Before he can think anything on the strange nickname she has suddenly bestowed on him, Gold follows her over the edge, and in the bright pulse of his orgasm, everything becomes clear.

“Belle!”

Her eyes fly open, Belle’s eyes, Lacey’s eyes, they’re one and the same but this is most definitely Belle he’s seeing now, and she pulls him in close and kisses him with a fervour that Lacey has never matched. She’s crying, and he’s crying, and somehow in the middle of it all they manage to untangle their limbs and get rid of the condom. Finally, quiet once more, they just lie there looking at each other, Rumpelstiltskin still reeling under the sudden onslaught of memories that have just flooded back into his mind, and Belle just watching him with all the love in the world in her eyes, unable to take her hands off him, as if she thinks that he might vanish if she stops touching him.

“Oh Belle…”

“My Rumpel.”

The curse is not broken, not yet, at least, but this small corner of it is. When he was creating the intricate spell that Regina would use to cast the curse, Rumpelstiltskin made certain to add this failsafe, that no matter what, he and Belle would be able to wake each other when the time came. He certainly never expected the awakening to take place in quite such dramatic fashion, but if true love breaks all curses, then he can’t think of any better expression of it.

“How long have you been awake?” he asks.

“Not long,” Belle replies. “Just a couple of days. When you kissed me in the alley behind Granny’s, the last time we were there. It all came back to me then. It’s been agony these last few days, not knowing if you were awake too, and having to try and pretend to be Lacey, pretend that nothing’s happened and that I didn’t love you the way I do.”

“I love you too, Belle.”

They can get into the whys and wherefores later. For now, there is too much lost time to make up for. Lacey and Gold have been in their strange relationship for a long time, but Belle and Rumpelstiltskin have not been together for just as long. Belle nestles into Rumpelstiltskin’s arms, and he welcomes her burrowing in against him, holding her close. He’s missed having her so close, and right now, he never wants to let her go. Tomorrow they will have to become Mr Gold and Lacey once more, and act those personas to the world to stop certain others becoming suspicious at their sudden change in personality.

For now though, they’re Rumpelstiltskin and Belle, and they’re just as much in love as they were back in the Enchanted Forest.


End file.
